* Asus N61JQ Owners Lounge *

I believe that setting is meant to be used for diagnostics/debugging, and it should be left unchecked. On my system, it is unchecked (and "1" is greyed out in the dropdown menu).

If you want to check the performance of your i7, run the attached benchmark (it is a standalone EXE that doesn't install anything on your computer). You should score around 12.1.

 

Thanks stevedogg. Mine is set the same so I will leave it as is. My score was 12.25.

 

Used a Sager np8660. However, the cooling was very bad and with all the processor intensive stuff I used to do, the graphics card just died and it was out of warranty by that time.

But so far the n61 is holding up well, it seems like it was made for this kind of work which I am happy to say was my hope when I purchased the laptop. However, I do wish it came with an Nvidia card since it seems all bias in Windows editing software is leaning towards that rather than ATI.

 

Lurking??? No! It is more of a stalking kind of thing. Lurking would mean that I am paying attention to everything. I am just watching YOU! MUHAHAHAHAHA


HA!

 

I tried a different mouse (Apple Magic Mouse), and it disconnected on me also, so it's not just my Dell mouse. It must be the bluetooth module on this laptop, or it could still be a driver issue (though I have tried many drivers at this point). I'd hate to RMA over something like bluetooth and risk the laptop coming back with other problems

 

Yes, same..
It's obviosuly the actual bluetooth module that was used for the N61/N71's?
My only suggestion is to by a nano receiver mouse, and ditch the bluetooth ones

 

I'm still not sure about that... it seems there are a LOT of people having bluetooth issues with Windows 7. Just installed this hotfix: KB980396. The saga continues, one attempt at a time ...

 

Yes lol, well if you find a fix keep us posted

 

Amazon.com: Logitech Wireless Anywhere Mouse MX for PC and Mac: Electronics
With a nano receiver I have no connection problems. This one works great for me but its a little pricey. You can use up to 6 devices off of the nano receiver. The receiver is so small that I have completely forgot it is their and I never take it out.
_______________________________________________________________

We have a new N61 owner asking what we can do to get Asus to offer an extended life battery. I know we have been down this road before and it seems hopeless with the hinge design. But they could design a new battery
to fit this if they wanted to. I am from the school that you don't get if you don't ask so I always ask. So I think its time for every N61 owner to ask Asus for a Dam 9 cell battery !!!
So please everyone take the time to let Asus know it is not acceptable to you that you don't have this option. Do it now!! Please ?
Here is a feedback link. Feedback I don't know if it is the best link for this if someone finds a better one let us know.

 

That one didn't work. Still had a drop while video chatting. I just installed another one KB982046, but it doesn't even describe my problem, so I doubt it will help.

Edit: ...and that one didn't fix it either! Just had another drop. The webcam really makes it happen fast. Someone else making the same correlation.

 

Does the Lenovo W510 have the same bluetooth module as us (BT-270)?
Because if so i belive that might be a dodgy bluetooth module...
If it is a dodgy module how would we fix it? Get a better one maybe?

 

It's possible. Wonder what would be a good one to replace it with...

 

Guys, do you have a problem with the sidebar.exe on your N61? Mine had it. I believe it is becoz of Windows 7. It will only come like a small white rectangle at the side. But it only happens on my own profile(w/ admin rights), the built-in admin profile is okay. I tried all other gadgets including the intel one, but all have the same results. I also tried the command prompt thingy, (registering msxml3.dll, scrrun.dll and jscript.dll) but it didnt work for me, though it said it was registered successfully.

Any help guys?

 

Try backing up all your current stuff, and then just make a new account on windows 7

And i came here because i was just wondering how many other people here play GTA IV online? 'cos i am a bit now PM me your username and ill add you on it

 

how is the performance of gta 4 with this laptop?
also what are the max gpu temps under full load.

 

Well ive got mine (has a 5,400 HDD so you might get a bit better)
Everything on medium,
Except water which is on max, with shadows off..
And Anti Aliasing on lowest
1366x768 and for memory all the sliders are on 25

 

I ordered a replacement bluetooth module. It is an HP part using the Broadcom BCM92070MD chipset. I think this is the same chip used in most new bluetooh modules (including the BT-270). Hopefully something is different to make it work better.

 

Alrighty, where'd you grab it from? And how much was it? Because i'm interested if it works

 

A couple questions if anybody readily has the answers:
1. Can I set the hinge close to trigger Sleep instead of Hibernate?
2. Is there a way to hotkey Fn+F7 to completely turn off the LCD rather than turn off the backlight?

 

I got it from a random seller on eBay for $29.99. I'll let you know if it works; it's pretty easy for me to induce a drop, so I should know within a day or two of getting it.

1) Yes: right click battery/plug icon in taskbar, choose "Power Options". For the currently selected power plan, click "Change plan settings", "Change advanced power settings". Expand "Lid close action" and choose the desired action for battery and AC (e.g. sleep).

2) Turning off the backlight is turning off the LCD. Unless you mean preventing the voltages from getting to the crystals themselves, in which case I think you're out of luck.

 

Many thanks, stevedogg! As for turning off the LCD, I was probably mistaken when using a prompt that's called "Turn Off LCD" when all it really is is a manual screensaver.

 

Okay, so it's the time of the year that I look at my aging ASUS N61JQ and start eyeing the future. I love my ASUS but, as you all know, I upgrade once a year. This means that I am going to get a new laptop either the end of January or the beginning of February. So, it is time for all of the founders to look into their crystal balls and start figuring out what we are all upgrading to. I did tell everyone that we are upgrading at the same time!!!

;-)

 

Lol, my laptop has been so faithful and still looks as good as it did when I first bought it (minus all the stickers). I'll retire him after the warranty is over, promise.

P.S. I might consider the 'Mac' thing just to give it a proper chance by that time. I've worked on them a lot but never owned one myself.

 

I got the X1 so, my warranty is over in February.

 

How do you normally get rid of the older laptops? I've found that people where I am from are not willing to buy second hand laptops.

 

I've never had problems selling them. I either post an ad in the paper, Craigs List or eBay. Usually in that order.

 

Jesus David you can't even wait until Black friday to bring this up? Sure you upgrade every year. Why not when you probobaly get half of them for FREE !! Anyway don't you have a surgery to focus on? Don't take my N61 away yet man .
Seriously I am all in on the latest toys but I would like to see a nice technological upgrade instead of just some small incrimental replacement of something that is working well.
Ok what are we gonna buy and how much can we get for this old brick?

 

Lol it isnt that old
I was in Harvey Norman today, they don't even sell Asus laptops anymore! :O
I think you guys should get the N53 or similar It looks decent
Anyway, it's your choice but it's not that old. Good luck finding anything too much better, as the i7 is still the best processor for laptops... and new Graphics cards aren't that much better eh?
Anyway lol

 

I'm happy with my N61JQ, but if I had it all to do again, I'd get one with an i5 and switchable graphics. I find myself wishing for longer battery life when I'm doing lightweight stuff.

 

Yeah same, but you can't get switchable in the N61/N series can you?
But yeah i'd grab an i5 for sure..

Also just a quick question... Has anyone found a TV tuner for this yet..
Like an internal one that i could put in myself...? I'm possibly interested lol

 

I am also keeping my N71JQ for a little bit longer.
I usually upgrade my notebook after about 2 years time.
Besides, I don't think that currently there are many notebooks out there which are within the same price range and that have many new technical innovations compared to our N61/N71JQ.

@LordDaven If you are planning to buy another intel based platform, then you should wait until the Huron River platform comes out. I think it will be available in Q1 2011. Maybe by then the new generation of mobile GPUs from AMD would also be out.

I will wait until Chief River Platform is out near end of 2011 or start of 2012.

 

wow, im one step back, i guess..i just bought this N61JQ. maybe because where i am from is expensive everywhere. haha! but i still love this baby, though the battery life is a bit frustrating..

anyway, i am going to install Ubuntu soon, but i am quite new to Linux. any advice guys? or tips? like how many GB i should reserve and any incompatibility with drivers and stuffs like that.. thanks in advance guys!

 

Oh I'm not ready to upgrade, I'll be using this machine for hopefully another 3 years.

dolgilla: I think I gave my Ubuntu partition 10GB, with a 4GB swap partition. I'm currently running 64-bit 10.04, and it seems more stable than the 32 bit I was running. There really wasn't much to configure. Everything except sleep worked right out of the box. It's a well polished OS.

 

Thanks Atook! I have 640GB in N61 so I gave a 250GB to Ubuntu 10.10, 64bit.
It is terrific! They have every softwares and programs by default!

How can I do a 4GB sawp partition like urs? what does it mean?

 

Good info. I am looking to purchase around February so, Huron River is what I will eyeball.

For graphics, I wouldn't mind the latest AMD chips but, the NVIDIA 400 series is pretty sweet too.

 

It may have been set up during your install. As far as I know, it's only used to swap out memory if your 4GB of RAM is used up. I have yet to do this in Windows or Ubuntu, so I wouldn't worry about it.

 

Nah, I'll keep mine until it becomes too slow , for now my money is going towards an upgrade from my old Panasonic CRT TV to a nice Panasonic Plasma .

 

haha. yeah well the overheating of this computer has gotten considerably worse in only 6 months of use. i can't even watch HD movies or play games without taking the bottom cover off or else it'll shut down on me.

actually am turning it over to Asus first this Saturday since the global warranty works here in Tokyo, JP as well. So then it's just about getting by without it for 2 weeks...3-4 weeks if they need parts from taiwan/usa.

then i'm going to sell it i think and just build a PC.

 

Deathwinger- How is the movie coming along? Is your N61 going to make it onto the credits?

nihonjon- I didn't realize your overheating was that bad. Good luck with your warranty work. Let us know how it goes. How is the economy doing in Tokyo? Its a little rough right now here in Seattle.

David,
Even though I have never met you I consider you a friend along with the other contributors here. My sense is the founders are not ready to move on yet. Myself I think I will use this N61 until something comes out that blows my socks off. Like when I got my i7 desktop and couldn't wait until they came out with an i7 laptop. Lately I have been wondering how far the Tablets are going to go and if that might be my next purchase.
Now when you get the next model you have to let us know so we can keep tabs on you. If we can't move to the next laptop together then lets target the one after that. And as a founder you are required to check in from time to time. And if you don't you are off the list!! And there will be no soup for you!! Although you would still be permitted to hook us up with some free stuff.

 

Okay Greg we went and ask for the 9 cell battery

 

fabsblu, Since you have passed the 100 post level here, and we could use an Italian in the club. I am adding you to the major contributors list on the first page.

 

I use Linux Mint 10 64 bit on mine I have it divided as follows

20 gb /
4.5 gb swap
384 gb /home
the rest is unpartitioned and reserved for whatever
For the most part everything works. I think there is an issue with suspend as it suspends then will not recover you have to power off. I just set it so that it doesn't suspend as I really don't have that much use for the feature. BTW: LM 10 is based off Ubuntu & in December they will have LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) 64 bit, right now they only have 32 bit. I actually prefer LMDE even though you have to do a little tweaking to get everything to work. It uses a smaller memory footprint.

 

Need a Tasmanian by any stretch?
haha I'm only joking lol

 

Yes, I consider us friends also. I need to get your number one of these days so we can finally talk. But don't worry, I wont go too far even after upgrading. How could I? We have fought many trolls together. HA!

I have an iPad (I didn't tell any because it came with the MacBook Pro) and it is pretty sweet. I might get a Samsung tablet soon from another customer.

I am still not 100% positive that I am going to upgrade. I always said that I was going to keep it until the warranty expired. If ASUS sends me a way to extend, I will extend it and keep if for another year. I may skip getting another laptop and actually put a desktop in my house. Weird huh? Me having a desktop!

I have been looking around and there really haven't been too many advances in laptop technology. But, I honestly haven't pulled my ASUS out of my laptop bag since I had issues with Netbeans. Was that 2 months ago? I may move the N61 over to the monitor/keyboard permanently and take the Macbook Pro around with me. The biggest reason for that is that the Macbook is 13" and lighter. Plus, it gets between 7-10 hours of battery. Not to mention, I like Ubuntu as my desktop OS and it runs great on the ASUS.

Either way, I will always be around. It isn't like I haven't committed the ASUS to memory. I am pretty sure I will always be able to contribute when it comes to the ASUS. ;-)

 

anybody else having problems with their left trackpad button not responding well. sometimes i have to press it real hard and sometimes it wont work at all.

 

Someone was before, they RMA'd it for memory.
They had two of them also and they both did it, it's possibly a problem with the trackpad.. For now just use a wireless mouse? (;

 

HELP- Administrators, Anyone
I was directed to this owners lounge as the official N61 owners which is suppose to cover all N61 models. I am very FRUSTRATED because all I find in this lounge is N61JQ. I want discussions on the N61JV not JQ. Can someone please direct me there if it even exists. Please!

 

stevedogg,

Thanks for the added tip on v212 of the bios having a high fan speed w/ 8gb of memory. I recently upgraded to the same memory that you mentioned above.

Here's my question. I installed the new G.SKILL 8GB (2 x 4GB) with v212 originally and got my first N61JQ BSOD :-( a couple of minutes into my Windows session. Thereafter, I downgraded to v210 and noticed the fan speed at boot and shutdown became normal as you had mentioned.

My biggest concern is whether v212 is unstable with 8gb of memory beyond the fan speed issue or is my memory faulty.

I was hoping you did some testing switching back and forth between bioses or could provide insight as to whether v212 is indeed unstable with 8gb of memory.

Lastly, I ran Memtest86+ v4.10 for two passes and got 0 errors (~2hr runtime) so I'm hoping that my memory sticks are good and don't need to be RMA'd.

Looking forward to your insight, so far no BSOD on v210 w/8gb memory but runtime has been under 30 minutes.

Anyone else get BSOD on v212 bio with 8gb?

Thanks for all your contributions.

Mike

Also, FYI to people w/ 212 bios, it indeed runs hot, after downgrading to v210, all 8 of my threads for my cores dropped 5-7 degrees Celsius @ idle, what did Asus do w/ v212?

Any word on the new bios release date?

 

I think this is as close as you'll get, it's not N61JV specific, but not Q specific either..

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-reviews-owners-lounges/419712-asus-n61-owners-lounge.html

 

I ran it with V212 for a short while (maybe a week?) with no BSOD or noticeable issues other than the fan speed on startup thing. I switched back to V210, then back to V212, then back to V210 to be sure that BIOS was causing the fan problem (it was). ASUS support told me a new version will be coming that fixes the fan problem.

I only ran one memtest pass but also got 0 errors.

Regarding temps, I found that V212 was cooler for me than V210 (maybe 3-4 degrees after 5 max-memory intel burn test passes).